Loves lies bleeding: the PM and the pen

Michael Gordon

TWO grumpy old men are sitting side by side on a verandah at a nursing home with a view of Sydney Harbour, rugs covering their knees to keep them warm, and bantering about the past over cups of tea. If they disagree about many things, they are at one on the central proposition.

''We could have done more, and we might have done things differently, but by God we did a lot! And what fun there was in doing it,'' Paul Keating says to the man who was, for a period during his prime ministership, his closest confidant and soul mate.

The last time Paul Keating and Don Watson spoke in person was at the launch of Recollections of a Bleeding Heart in 2002. Photo: Penny Bradfield

''And you were a prick sometimes, but I've forgiven you.'' To which Don Watson replies, playfully: ''No, you were the prick!''

Watson can't remember whether the scene came to him in a dream, or whether he actually described it in a letter to Keating when they were on speaking terms. All he can say with absolute authority now is that it is pure fantasy, and never going to happen.

''It's how it should have finished up, but it's been over for 10 years,'' Watson says flatly, over freshly brewed coffee at his home nestled among the stringybarks in a forest near Woodend, a town that once serviced the Victorian goldfields of Bendigo and Castlemaine. "It seems like a ridiculous loss, but so what?"

It is now nearly a decade since Watson published his award-winning portrait of his former boss during his time as prime minister, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, and stood beside Keating during what must surely be a candidate for the most bizarre book launch in Australian publishing history. On August 31, the book that won five major literary awards will be re-released with a 5000-word afterword that deals with Keating's reaction.

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Back in May of 2002, the official launcher was indigenous leader Noel Pearson who, after his initial reading of the manuscript, had told Watson he considered it to be a love story.

At Sydney Town Hall, however, he steered clear of the relationship between writer and subject, instead seizing the opportunity to ''chloroform'' the captive, overflowing audience of Labor true believers with a 45-minute oration on the case for ''tough-love'' welfare reform. Watson recalls feeling he had been nailed to the floor during Pearson's speech. ''It was like standing next to a porcupine - on fire!''

Worse was to come.

When Keating spoke, it was, says Pearson, like watching a sea hawk pin its kill with its talons and slice live fish into still-quivering sashimi.

Watson writes in his afterword that Keating left the audience in no doubt about his ''loathing'' of the book - though this was not my impression on the night. The audience was so big and on such a high - for this was the literary event of the year - that few could see the discomfort in Keating's body language or sense his anger.

Comparing the narrative to a black-box recorder in a plane, Keating remarked: ''It starts in February 1992 and it stops when the plane crashes, but the interesting thing about this recorder is that it only records one conversation - and that's with the pilot, not the crew or the passengers.''

In another trademark metaphor, he suggested the gloomy tone of some sections of the book was because Watson had the inclinations of a fruit bat. ''He always heads back to the darkness to feed.'' Most in the room thought he was being affectionate. He wasn't. ''I don't care about the books. I don't care about the accolades, truly,'' he concluded. ''What I care about is whether it all mattered.''

That Keating saw the book as an act of betrayal would have been apparent to few other than Watson. The author had received a fax from the former prime minister days before the launch that was so blisteringly hostile that he wasn't sure whether Keating would even honour his commitment to attend. ''He just thought I'd been a total bastard, that I hadn't told the real story,'' Watson says of the fax.

Keating's view today is unchanged. It matters not that, according to Carmen Lawrence, who writes a new foreword to the book, ''readers almost invariably come away from Recollections with a greater regard for Keating''. As one who remains very close to the former prime minister puts it: ''Paul will go to his grave absolutely convinced that it was an act of betrayal and an act of gross misrepresentation - that Don exaggerates his role and diminishes Paul not only by that manoeuvre, but also by his depiction of Paul as someone who is looking like Hamlet, torn by indecision on the battlements."

For Keating, it was the final of a string of calamities that began with losing the 1996 election to his political nemesis John Howard, and included the end of his marriage to Annita. As the source quoted above sees it: "In many ways the Watson book was a greater calamity for Paul. That's where it sits in his psyche."

Certainly, the two men, who constituted one of this country's most effective speechwriter and prime minister partnerships, have not been in the same room since the launch. It has not been a public, verbal feud, but it has amounted to one of the most enduring, unexpected fallings-out in modern Australian political history.

Watson has not since worn the soft-yellow suit he wore at the launch at the suggestion of his then wife, Hilary McPhee. He was later told by Phillip Adams that Keating was outraged by his dress sense: the colour of the suit and the fact that it was crumpled. "The final insult was to his sartorial sense."

The only conversation between the two since then came a year later, when Watson was in Sydney and rang Keating to suggest they have a drink.

"There was a long pause. And then I felt a bit like Manuel in Fawlty Towers: 'Mr Keating, he go crazy!' And he stopped half an hour later. I don't know what he said. It sounded insane to me. He just shouted, ranted. Then his battery went down and he hung up and that was it. Haven't heard from him since."

The one thing Watson can remember Keating saying was this: "If I'd known what you were going to do, I would never have employed you."

It was Mark Ryan, who ran Keating's media operation, who invited Watson to consider writing speeches for the new prime minister in 1992. Ryan, still in his 20s, had directed the media office of the Victorian premier, John Cain, before he joined Keating's staff, and knew Watson from his days writing speeches for Cain.

Watson's initial response was to say no.

"Almost everything in Paul Keating's youth was different from my
own," he wrote in Recollections. "The difference reflects the great divide in culture and experience that ran through the old, pre-multicultural Australia. All the familiar elements - ancestry, religion, politics, class, culture - were the opposite of mine."

When the two met on January 9, 1993, Keating was wearing one of those famously elegant suits and patent leather shoes. "He stood front-on and gave me his little short-arm handshake, and a look with his famous brown eyes," Watson wrote. "The first impression was tiredness, languor, withdrawal. By the time I left half an hour or so later it was sadness, melancholy. It would remain the dominant impression. It's why I liked him and knew at once that I wanted the job."

Keating, now 67, was five years older and it didn't take long for them to click. They shared a vision for the country, a love for painting pictures with words and a capacity for melancholia. In time, Watson became senior adviser as well as speechwriter and principal confidant on matters personal as well as political. "It was not so much Hamlet as Don Quixote that Paul resembled in my eyes - and my eyes were those of a sort of Sancho Panza, following faithful but bemused, on a donkey," Watson says now.

''In either case, Hamlet or Quixote, the comparison is flattering - both are synonymous with the purest courage and thoughts too profound for ordinary beings to plumb. As for Sancho Panza, so for me - what a wonder to hook up with such a man and such a mind.''

Once inside the prime minister's office, Watson observed that the advisers fell into two broad camps: the pointy heads, or economic rationalists; and those, like himself, who believed more in people than markets. They were the bleeding hearts.

But there was another division, too. Two members of staff were intending to write books about their experiences, while the rest would be bound by an unwritten vow of confidentiality (Simon Balderstone, one of the senior advisers, summed up this understanding during a speech at his own farewell when he said they were like guests at the Eagles' Hotel California: "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.")

The other would-be author was one of the pointy heads, John Edwards, an economist now on the board of the Reserve Bank. He had been invited by Keating to join the staff in 1991 with the clear understanding that he would draw on the experience to write a book.

Edwards's 1996 book, Keating: The Inside Story, was marketed as the "definitive biography", with the author expressing his gratitude in the preface that the former prime minister had found time to read his manuscript and "make many valuable suggestions for its improvement".

Watson volunteers now that the amount of time Keating devoted to the Edwards enterprise was a fleeting source of resentment. "I sent him an email saying, 'Well, now you have given John the story of the economy, I'll just have to give them the story of your head.' I was a bit pissed off.'' While Watson insists he quickly forgot about this petty jealousy, he says Keating brought it up again after the release of Recollections. "He reminded me after the book was published that this was my revenge on him. Well, that's bullshit. I didn't give the Edwards book another thought."

For a long time after Labor's defeat, Watson says he scarcely gave his own book another thought, either. ''I had the makings of a book, but for three years I didn't have the will - or, as it happened, the wherewithal - to write it,'' he writes in the afterword.

He wrote three film scripts, including one for the Billy Connolly film The Man Who Sued God, and, when he did return to the project in the summer of 1999, he struggled.

''My problem was the voice. Who was speaking: a historian, an insider or both? The story of the insider was personal, close and unfinished. I was still living it. So was Paul Keating," he writes. "In those days we often lived it together, on the phone mainly.''

At first he attempted to write from what he called the magisterial position, where he was invisible. Then he thought it best to simply annotate the diary he had kept during Keating's reign. Finally, he chose to write from ''where I had been, at that angle, on the deck of the Pequod, not halfway up the mast or trailing in a whaleboat''.

Rather than a black-box recorder, Watson saw his book as the product of a hand-held camera, focused on Keating in the main, but not to the exclusion of the people around him: a camera that would go where he took it and record only when he switched it on. Just as Keating's capacity for melancholia had attracted Watson to the job, it framed many of the portraits in Recollections.

Watson insists that he fully intended to show Keating the manuscript prior to publication, but was persuaded this would be a mistake by one who knows Keating well. ''Don't do it,'' he was told. ''You'll never get it published.''

In the end, Watson says he told Keating: ''You're just going to have to trust me.''

"That's all right, I trust you," he says Keating replied. ''Paul put total trust in me, and the book was not the book he wanted, and the book he imagined, so the trust was broken. I think he thought I was going to produce the record of his prime ministership and the record was not as it should have been as far as he was concerned,'' Watson says. ''Naturally, he would be disappointed and maybe hurt. What surprises me is that it's disappointment and hurt until death - it's all over mate. I think that's silly and wrong and destructive and pointless and a folly. But that's it.''

Watson has deposited the written exchanges between himself and Keating about the book, along with the early drafts, in his file at the National Library, not to be opened before his death. Keating declined to expand on his sense of grievance to The Saturday Age.

One indication that he is not looking back will be the publication in coming weeks of After Words, a collection of Keating speeches and writings covering the period since he and Watson parted ways in 1996. It is being billed as ''the closest thing we'll ever get to an autobiography of the prime minister we had to have''. As one close to Keating puts it, ''Paul's central argument is, 'My political career was not a function of Don. I did fine without him.'''

In fact, Keating has mentioned Recollections, or Watson, only once in public since the launch, and then only after he was provoked by a story in The Sydney Morning Herald last year.

The occasion was a decision by the National Film and Sound Archive to include footage of one of Keating's most powerful speeches, the Redfern address, in its collection. Journalist Andrew West paraphrased Watson in the story as saying that while he had written the speech, the credit belonged to Keating for reading it, unedited. Keating was enraged and penned an opinion piece accusing Watson of being wrong on the facts and condescending in his tone. The truth of it is that the Keating outburst was a surrogate for the deeper grievance and an even more serious accusation: that Watson had broken a more fundamental (but still unwritten) compact in Recollections.

To this, Watson's response is emphatic. ''The thing is, I signed on as his speechwriter. I didn't sign on as a lifetime factotum or a retainer. Paul can't be the man he is and have the public persona that he has without posing a whole set of questions - why is he like this? Why can he be a man of such high sensibility and yet so brutish sometimes? The answers aren't simple,'' he says.

Some, like Mark Ryan, say the mistake both men made was in not sitting down and agreeing on a set of ground rules at the outset. But would a conversation about ground rules have changed things? Not likely.

''Maybe we should have had this conversation, but given the violence of his reaction, obviously, if I had shown him and sat down with him, I wouldn't have been able to say the things that were said,'' Watson tells me.

And here's the rub. Though he did not anticipate Keating's reaction and remains saddened at the friendship lost, Watson made a choice, one every bit as decisive and irrevocable as Keating's decision to wipe him.

''If he feels betrayed, I have to concede the possibility that I betrayed him,'' he explains in the afterword. ''In that case, I can only hope that one day he will realise the 'betrayal' had nothing to do with spite or neglect of his feelings, but with reasons concerning the business of writing that are no less compelling to a writer than reasons arising from politics are to a politician. It was not for want of admiration or loyalty or gratitude that I did not write a book that pleased him.

''It comes down to the fact that everyone who sets out to write history must be free to decide how he will do it. It can't be any other way. I regret only a few things more deeply than Paul Keating's belief that he was betrayed by this book, but if I had written it according to his lights rather than mine, from any angle other than mine, I would have betrayed myself. And, for want of a more clinical term, history - the bit I saw at least - would have been betrayed as well.''